500M Windows 10 devices, half of 2018 goal

These are skills from developers that Microsoft have worked with privately, but will now open up this development to integrate with Cortana to all developers.

In addition to the 500 million monthly active Windows 10 devices, Microsoft announced several other factoids of Office, Azure, Cortana and bot adoption.

Microsoft has issued an emergency patch program to fix a weakness in several Windows browsers, created by the company’s own antivirus software.

The Windows 10 user experience is intuitive, and users generally adapt with little or no training. That puts it just halfway to Microsoft’s ambitious goal of running on one billion active devices by mid-2018.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled new tools meant to democratise artificial intelligence (AI) by enabling machine smarts to be built into software from smartphone games to factory floors.

Amazon recently made a similar move, opening up the technologies behind the Alexa-enabled Amazon Echo smart speakers.

Earlier this week, Microsoft unveiled an internet-connected speaker featuring Cortana in a partnership with Samsung’s Harman Kardon. At this year’s Build, the company’s conference for developers, it was all about AI, voice assistants and … not leading us into a tech dystopia.

Powerpoint can now translate slideshows in real time. A Microsoft Garage project, the plug-in uses Translation APIs to translate content from any Powerpoint presentation into 10 different languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish).

In another move that is bound to get developers salivating, Microsoft launched its Visual Studio coding platform for Mac. “The update addresses a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution if the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scans a specially crafted file”. Access to this shell is also available in the Azure mobile apps. Exact data on which users have converted to Windows 10 is impossible to come by, but there’s some reason to think this latest push might have been more business-oriented.

The company even tried piggyback on Windows Phone devices, but the attempt went in vain.